Petty Romance reviewed

Kim Jeong-hoon's debut feauture, Petty Romance, is said to be one of South Korea's box office smash hits, and I can understand why this was the case, as it does not only warms the heart, but also increases paper handkerchiefs manufacturers' profits.

The film is a light comedy, its rather mundane story line of boy meets girl, they pretend they do not like each other, when they do, with the expected tear jerking closure, is raised by the quality of its acting, and the integration of Seok Jeong-hyeon's adult Korean comic book style illustrations, used to express the inner thoughts and feelings of the protagonists. Jung-bae (Lee Sun-Kyun), a talented but rather unsuccessful cartoonist, a brilliant illustrator, but not so good at story telling, hires Da-rim (Choi Kang-hee), a cirpy sex columnist who have just been fired from her magazine, to see if he can have a chance of winning a multinational adult cartoon contest. Da-rim's exuberant imagination makes up for her total lack of experience on sex and love, a galore of comical scenes follows, and hinting at the role laying we do every day to get on in life.

The story goes through the usual “will they?”, with the expected highs and lows of their relationship, contained jealously of their lives outside the times they spend together. However, this mundanity is raised by the illustrations interlaced into the plot, produced, and imagined, by both of them, as the comic book gets written.

A heart warming and enjoyable comedy that lays open to our prying eyes the process of producing an adult Manwha, a Korean comic book.

Petty Romance DVD is out for sale in Britain under the Terracotta Distribution label.

A SEX COLUMNIST AND A COMIC BOOK ARTIST TEAM UP TO CREATE THE ULTIMATE FEMALE ACTION MANGA HERO.
 

 Starring: Lee Sun-kyun (Oki's Movie, Paju, Night and Day, Coffee Prince), Choi Kang-hee (My Scary Girl, Whispering Corridors), Oh Jung-se, Ryu Hyun-kyung

Korea / 2010 / 118 Mins / In Korean with English subtitles

 

One of South Korea’s biggest box office smashes, first-time director Kim Joung-hoon’s PETTY ROMANCE comes to UK on DVD 8th October 2012
 

Spectacular action and sizzling love scenes from the couple’s imagination were given life through the hand of award winning illustrator Seok Jeong-hyeon.
The movie captures the process of adult animation production and director Kim Jeong-hoon uses a great technique of mixing feature film and adult Manwha (Korean comic books) for erotic & fighting segments when the couple’s inner thoughts come alive into action.

Synopsis
 An adult cartoon contest is announced offering a $100,000 prize. Talented cartoonist Jung-bae (Lee Sun-Kyun) is constantly turned down by publishing companies because of his poor story lines. To raise his chances of winning, he hires a sex advice columnist, Da-rim (Choi Kang-hee), a self-claimed expert on relationship and love-making with big imagination and zero experience. For the cartoon competition, Da-rim comes up with the idea of a female assassin, Ma Mi-so, who keeps her male victims captive for erotic kicks.
The two, who seemed perfectly matched, team up for the lucrative prize, bringing out their respective wildest fantasies. Trouble is set to brew: will they be able to complete the task and win the competition?…
Live action interspersed with erotic and action manga scenes.

DVD Special Features

• Making of
• Interview of lead actor and actress
• Korean Teaser Trailer
• Stills Gallery

Comedy, 2010
Certificate 15
Country: South Korea.
Language: Korean with English subtitles.
Running time: 118 min

Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, reviewed

What I remembered of Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man, when I first saw it in the big screen sometime during the 1980s, was the frenzied and high contrast imagery, rather than the story itself, rather minimalist: a man, a lowly pawn in the economic and social order in post-war Japan, becomes an iron cyborg, the voyeuristic camera gazing at his despair as the transformation of his body takes place. A kind of alchemist transmutation of lowly, rusting, and discarded iron, into something else, into a kind of cyber cyclop, a process being guided by an iron fetishist he ran over when going out for a ride with his girlfriend, on what was termed, at the time, cyber-punk.

Undoubtedly, the anarchist anti-establishment ethos of the film, reflected on the visual craziness, is akin to punk in its frenzied imagery, dislocated juxtapositions of extremely short abstract takes piled one of top of the previous one, merging into each other at other times, a frenetic clash of human flesh and scrap metal, the opening scene being dramatically brutal, scenes populated by cyber zombies, a recurrent image of transmuting iron worms acting as a kind of leitmotif across both films being particularly effective in portraying the sensual nature of decaying scrap metal, made alive by this process of transformation. The soundtrack is also rather memorable, adding to this feeling of brutaleroticism with its torrent of industrial sequence of sounds, punctuating the torrent of images invading our eyes.

The fact that it was shot on black and white 16 mm film stock on a low budget, as an afterthought , following the success of an underground theatrical performance, also written and directed by Shinya Tsukamoto, adds to the aura of transgression surrounding it, which made Tetsuo: The Iron Man a cult film residing in the outer regions of cinema, hence this release on DVD and Blu-ray formats under the third window films label, together with Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (which is not, really, its sequel, but a different treatment of the subject), a digitization process done under the careful eyes of Shinya Tsukamoto. While on the interview contained in this release, Tsukamoto does not confronts the political undertones of Tetsuo, implicit in the label of punk, he does, indirectly, refers to it, as he repeatedly mentions of his work at the time in an ads agency, and the nature of the first appearance of Tetsuo as an underground play.

What most impressed me of both films, but particularly on The Iron Man, is the beast-like baroque sensuality and eroticism imbued in this aesthetic of scrap metal and raw flesh, allusions to rusting iron hinting at not only the hardness of a male industrial fetishism, a kind of cyber-porn rather than cyber-punk, the scene of the drilling iron penis sported by the “salaried” man, aimed at his spooked girlfriend, is probably one of the most memorable sequences in cinema in its horrendously erotic bestial beauty, a metaphor for the inner brutality of a certain kind of male psyche; but also to the industrial decay of abandoned warehouses and factories, dark, scary underpasses, the harsh environments of urban railways, and roof tops of faceless skyscrapers (in Body Hammer) that store the countless pawns that make a contemporary industrial society tick.

By acts of obsessed will, on both films, the scrap iron littering this decaying landscape is slowly transformed into cybernetic cyclops, encompassing and absorbing several individuals (particularly in Body Hammer), massive and near pornographic cyborgs in their aggressive maleness, bent on taking on the world, cyborgs of apocalypse unleashed onto the quiet streets of suburbia, and onto the greyness of industry.

Women's roles on both films are subservient to the brutal aggressive and predatory maleness of their partners, of which they are not aware until it is too late to step back, a situation savagely alluded in the scene of the exploding child on a roof top in Body Hammer. In this sense, women prove to be incapable of arresting this transformation of their partners, fuelled by a visceral will of destruction and revenge.

This will is the trait that unify both films. It does not matter if they succeed, what is important is that process of transmuting the materials that litter the edges of a contemporary industrial society, either rusting iron, or lowly cannon fodder, men and women that no one sees, into a powerful force that challenges that society, that established order.

The bestial beauty of destruction...

And, perhaps, of creation...

Both Tetsuo films are part of a tradition of horror/science fiction genre, although with a rather raw DIY quality, acquiring a kind of visceral realism, which differs from the more polished mainstream cinema offerings. I found The Iron Man, the original Tetsuo film, to be the strongest one of the two, precisely because its story line is bare, having been reduced to its essential core. Body Hammer makes too many nods to mainstream cinema in its plot, such as the mad scientist, the criminal underground organization, the gangster-like characters, and the flashbacks to childhood traumas. Déjà vu. I presume the introduction of these elements was to make Tetsuo II a better box office proposition.

Cyber -punk, or cyber-porn, transgressive, and ultimately subversive, both Tetsuo became cult films, yet neutralized by mainstream culture by the act of pushing them into that box.

Tetsuo: Thee Iron Man / Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, are out in a 2 disc DVD and Blu-ray sets in Britain, under the third window films label.

TETSUO: THE IRON MAN
TETSUO II: BODY HAMMER
(cert 18)

A film by Shinya Tsukamoto (Kotoko, Snake of June, Vital)
 

Two of the most talked-about Japanese cult films of all time makes their way onto a double-disc blu-ray set for the first time in the world with a brand new high definition transfer supervised by Shinya Tsukamoto!

This 2 disc blu-ray and DVD set will include a brand new exclusive interview with Shinya Tsukamoto as well as the first English-subtitled release in the world of his 45 minute pre-Tetsuo student film ‘The Adventures of Electric Rod Boy’ which has also been remastered
 

The release will feature both a slipcase as well as a reversible sleeve so fans can choose whether they’d rather have an image from Tetsuo I or II on the front of their box.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man - Japan / 1989 / 67 Mins / In Japanese with English subtitles / B&W / 16mm

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer – Japan / 1992 / 83 minutes / In Japanese with English subtitles / Colour / 16mm

DVD/BLU-RAY Special Features:

New High Definition Transfer supervised by Shinya Tsukamoto
Exclusive interview with Shinya Tsukamoto
'The Adventures of Electric Rod Boy' - Shinya Tsukamoto's early film
New UK Trailer
Japanese Theatrical Trailers for both Tetsuo I & II

CORPO CELESTE reviewed

Such a pleasure to watch the intelligent, inquisitive, yet restless, Marta, as her gaze takes in the sights, the sounds, the smells, of her new city, her new reality, and attempts not only to comprehend it, but also, more importantly, to carve her own space within it, to sculpt her own identity by doing so.

Marta (Yle Vianello, such a beautiful name), a 13 year old who has grown up in Switzerland, has recently moved to deeply Catholic and conservative Southern Italy (the film was shot in Reggio di Calabria) with her mother and older sister, Rosa. Alice Rohrwacher, director and writer, in this stunning debut feature film, casts a non judgemental eye, and her lens, not only on a young girl's desire to mould herself within this new reality, within this new community, she feels like an outsider, and is constantly reminder of it by Santa, the priest's assistant, who runs the catechism classes she has to assist in order to undergo the Catholic ceremony of the confirmation; but also on her curiosity on her own growing body, as we see her contemplating in a mirror her burgeoning breasts, then for her to appropriate, and wear, her older sister's bra.

The moment where she finds out that she had had her first period, in a restaurant up the mountains having a snack with the priest, Don Mario (Salvatore Cantalupo), is set by Alice Rohrwacher as a matter-of-fact attitude by Marta, part of her process of growing up, of understanding of her reality, of her being. Her subsequent meeting with the old priest in a disused church located in a deserted village up the Calabrian mountains, paradoxically, by unsettling the view of Catholic doctrine as is being imparted on her, leads her to the independent path she is to follow to carve her identity.

The scene where she asks the meaning of the ritual words she has to repeat during the Confirmation ceremony in the catechism class, just to be sharply rebutted by Santa, resonated deeply in me, as it reminded of a experience I had some 40 years ago, in a completely different context, I had when I asked my Mathematics teacher ( I still remember his name) about the meaning of an equation. His rebuttal led me to completely abandon Maths at school, in spite of having been quite good at it. Somewhat, watching this scene, I understood Marta starting to recoil from her Catholicism, or, rather, from this deeply conservative vision of it that her community has, and tries to make her to sign to. Alice Rohrwacher's camera constantly reminds us of this traditional attitude, as when Marta watches from a rooftop a group of old women singing a religious song in a courtyard, or the initial scene, shot in the night, contrasting a pilgrimage against the secular background of passing trains, and the greyness of that no-man land found in our cities between railway lines, motorways, as dawn breaks-in.

The sad episode of the kittens does not only contributes to her increasing independence of her own self, but also exposes the unwitting double standards, perhaps even hypocrisy, of the Catholicism of the local community, when Marta, and her fellow classmates, enjoy themselves with the kittens they found in the store room of the church, just to be sharply rebutted, yet again, by a disgusted Santa, who gets the janitor to “take care” of the kittens. Marta, in despair, follows him, and watches as he beats the plastic bag where the tiny creatures are on the road, before throwing it into the river. After her attempts to save them fails, Marta is found wandering on the autostrada by Don Mario, the priest, who takes her to a political meeting. to which she wanders in, when she was not suppose to do, before climbing the mountains in search of a crucifix in that abandoned church, a crucifix he needs to make the Confirmation ceremony special, in an attempt to arrest the continuous decline of his church, perhaps giving him enough kudos to get a transfer by the bishop to a bigger parish. As Don Mario tells Marta, being a priest is also a job, what you do can make, or break, your career path.

The Italy of Corpo Celeste is not that of postcards, or the tourist office advertising boards, what Alice Rohrwacher constantly shows us is a ravaged landscape which has been altered, used, abused, and even abandoned, as Marta's and Don Mario's personal pilgrimage to that abandoned village in the mountains shows, and leading to epiphany for both of them.

I have read elsewhere users comments, where the tone is: “Who cares about the state of the Catholic Church?” Perhaps it may be so, particularly for British, or American audiences. However, I feel that Alice Rohrwacher may have not made Corpo Celeste for those audiences, in spite of having been distributed both in Britain and in the Sates. Hollywood studio cinema, to which we are getting more and more used due to their relentless marketing campaigns, is, mostly, designed as commercial products to satisfy the craving for entertainment of global audiences. Corpo Celeste belongs to another kind of cinema, a cinema that looks into the dynamic of small communities, of small lives, into their humanity.

Corpo Celeste is not only about the tribulations of a girl growing up, or about the state of the Catholic Church as seen in the context of a small community, but, fundamentally, casts an eye on a sense of identity in a world which is constantly evolving.

Corpo Celeste is released by Artificial Eye in the UK on DVD & Blu-ray on 10 September 2012.

Set deep in the south of Italy, Corpo Celeste is the story of 13 year old Marta who is struggling to resettle after ten years growing up in Switzerland. Bright-eyed and restless, she observes the sights, sounds and smells of the city but feels very much an outsider.

Marta is about to undergo the rite of confirmation. In the convention of the Catholic Church she takes catechism but confronts the morality of the local Catholic community. A series of subtle moments trace her journey as she connects and conflicts with her mother, sister and the Sunday school teacher Santa. From experiencing her period to making a bold decision to cut her hair, Marta begins to shape her own life for the first time since moving back to Italy.

Corpo Celeste heralds the arrival of a young and distinctive voice. Alice Rohrwacher’s writing and directing debut is a sensitive unveiling of the moral and religious layers that can smother adolescence.

EXTRA FEATURES:

Interview with the director Alice Rohrwacher

The Monk reviewed

Dominick Moll's The Monk follows the rise and downfall of Father Ambrosio (Vincent Cassel), a Capucin friar who was raised, and have lived all his life, within the walls of a monastery located just outside 17^th Century Madrid.

The film begins with a voice over a dark night scene, describing how Ambrosio came to the monastery, a baby dumped on its main doors after the servant carrying the tiny bundle that stormy night refused to dump him into the river, as evidently his instructions were, when lighting revealed a figure of the Virgin Mary, as if she was watching him, a kind of ancient Big Sister, or so he felt. Remember, what we are talking about here is deep Catholic Spain, centuries ago.

As the years pass away, Ambrosio's fame as a passionate, fiery and uncompromising preacher grows, the church overflowing with parishioners during his sermons, to the point that at least one of them, a young woman, Antonia (Joséphine Japy), faints the first time she heard him preaching. Obviously, this is the 17^th century equivalent of a modern day rock star, all that adulation...

But the monk is a preacher who lacks the compassion of those who have lived.

A key scene is when Ambrosio heards the confession of an inveterate sinner, and now pedophile (Sergi López), who describes the debauchery of his niece in great detail, whom he felt as if she were her own daughter, a confession which almost felt as if he was taunting the priest, perhaps trying to tempt him to go astray too. This character reappears at the end of the film, in different circumstances and guise, closing the story. About this time, Ambrosio tells Father Miguel (Jordi Dauder), his mentor and the friar who picked him up as a baby from the threshold of the monastery all those years ago, of a recurrent dream he has been having, a dream in which he sees a young woman clad in a red cloak, praying in front of the church, a woman whom he doesn't see her face, and whom he cannot touch.

Another key scene is where Ambrosio confesses a young novice, Sister Agnès (Roxana Duran), a confession that led to her death in the most horrendous circumstances at the hand of the Mother Superior (Geraldine Chaplin makes an appearance here). The same Mother Superior whom we see sternly humping the ground as she marches at the head of her covered novices during a procession of the Virgin Mary, a procession used by Ambrosio as cover to commit the deed that leads to his downfall, and punishment at the hands of the Inquisition, presumably. A deed like the one he himself sent Sister Agnès to her death.

The monk's fame also attracts a mysterious novice, Valerio (Déborah François), to the monastery. A novice who turns to be someone other than what he pretended to be, becoming the tool that led to his downfall, paradoxically after saving his life. Did Valerio do what he did unwittingly?

Meanwhile, Ambrosio grows increasingly obsessed with Antonia, the nature of their real relationship, and the horror that follows, not revealed until the very end, in an scene that ties together all the loose strings.

The Monk brilliantly conveys not only the febrile religiosity of a deeply flawed friar high on rhetoric, and short on compassion, but also the contradictions between an oppressive Catholic Church and the zest for life of the population in 17^th Century Spain.

However, I felt that The Monk hovered indecisively between being a horror film, and one exploring the nature, and the excesses, of extreme religious fervour, as the episode with the myrtle branch, itself an ancient emblem of love, indicates.

The Monk is released in the UK by Metrodome Distribution on 20^th August 2012

Certificate 15 / 101 Minutes

Directed by Dominik Moll (Lemming / Harry He’s Here To Help), THE MONK is a sumptuous adaptation of the eponymous cult classic Gothic novel which follows the rise and fall of a Capuchin Monk in 17th century Madrid.

Abandoned as a baby on the steps of a monastery and raised in strict Capuchin fashion, Ambrosio has become the most famous preacher in the country.

While large crowds from all over the country come to hear his mesmerizing sermons, he’s also bitterly envied for his success by certain fellow monks.

Convinced of his virtue and righteousness, Brother Ambrosio thinks he is immune to temptation until obscure events start terrorizing the monastery.

Could they be connected to the unexpected arrival of Valerio, an apprentice monk who has the miraculous gift to relieve Ambrosio’s splitting headaches and hides his disfigured face under a wax mask?

Starring Vincent Cassel ( Eastern Promises, Mesrine & Black Swan) Déborah François ( L’Enfant, The Page Turner) Sergi López ( Pan’s Labyrinth, Harry He’s Here to Help & Dirty Pretty Things) and Geraldine Chaplin ( Talk to Her, Doctor Zhivago & The Orphanage)

Silent Souls, a meditation on tradition and modernity

The burial of Tanya (Yuliya Aug), the beloved wife of Miron (Yuriy Tsurilo), according to the ancient traditions of the Merya people, gave director Aleksei Fedorchenko, and writer Denis Osokin, the vehicle to produce this visually stunning film, a cinematic poem not only about life and death, but also about the asphyxiating space left for the traditions, rites, ways of life of minorities, such as the Merya people, to culturally survive in the increasingly corporate and globalized space of contemporary life.

Miron, the manager of a rather dilapidated paper mill on post Soviet Union Russia, and Aist (Igor Sergeev), a forty something bachelor, who works as a photographer in the mill, embark on a long road journey for the cremation of Tanya's body, and the burial of her ashes, on the flowing waters of the river, according to their tradition. At one moment, during their travels, we see them wandering through the “stacked to the roof” aisles of a large supermarket in a provincial town, marvelling, to some extent, at the wide variety of goods, toying with some plastic toys. I could not stop having a feeling of nostalgia when I was watching this scene. I decry the increasingly cultural homogeneity and conformity resulting from the advance of modern capitalism.

Silent Souls is more than just a road film, it is a journey as much through a cultural landscape, through a landscape of the mind, as through a physical space. Miron finds out, as he “smokes”, in this road trip with Aist, much more about Tanya than he knew at first. “Smoking” is being defined in the film as a practice of the Merya, where they narrates intimate details of their conjugal relations after the spouse has died, if their interlocutor agrees. I am not sure if “smoking” is the right translation of the Merya word.

Visually, the stunning footage of the camera focussing on Aist's bicycle as he pedals home with the two birds he had just bought, tells us from the very beginning the nature of Silent Souls, not only a journey through the interstices of contemporary Russia, but a cinematic ode to the desire to escape from that confinement, from our confinement, in fact. Indeed, from this point of view, the sexual encounter between Miron and Aist with the two women after the burial is not only a song to life, but also a song to freedom, to be away from the sadness of death, from the ties of life. On this sense, the escape of the two buntings that Aist bought from a rather taciturn street seller, at the beginning of their journey, become inexorably linked to the escape of both Miron and Aist at the end of their road trip, as they return to the river.

What initially began as a journey initiated by Miron to honour his wife in death, as he did in life, through his “smoking” it also becomes Aist's journey, as it became clear that he was not only in love with Tanya, too, but he also brings up his own remembrances of his parents, the ridicule that his father, a poet in the Merya language, suffered. A scene comes up of Aist, as a child, helping his father to bury a typewriter in the river. Then, their encounter with the two women becomes an act of liberation for both of them, as it was their final act, when they return to the river, where a typewriter is waiting for Aist, while Tanya awaits Miron.